George C. Wolfe. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom Netflix, 2020. 1 hr, 34 min - Dee Rees. Bessie HBO Films, 2015. 1 hr, 55 min.

Abstract

The voices of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (1886–1939) and Bessie Smith (1894–1937) loom large in the music of the United States. In life, these performers dominated U.S. vaudeville theater circuits and made 200+ commercial blues records between them (with sales numbering in the millions). In my lifetime, these queer Black women—pioneers in their respective musical fields—have been newly embraced as the type of underrepresented historical figures that can, and should, anchor more inclusive notions of our collective past, present, and future. The side-by-side streaming of George C. Wolfe’sMa Rainey’s Black Bottom and Dee Rees’s Bessie in 2020 brings such efforts into sharp relief. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the product of an agreement between the estate of U.S. playwright August Wilson and actor Denzel Washington that will facilitate the production of film adaptations of all ten of Wilson’s plays. Prior to the 2020 release of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, only Fences and The Piano Lesson had received such treatment—limiting the extent to which Wilson’s influential work, and the experiences it illuminates, can be disseminated to a broad public audience. Bessie represents a similar commitment to more equitable public representations of Black American music, ultimately requiring more than twenty years to develop as a film and produce. As such, the pairing constitutes a compelling opportunity to examine the role of sound in bringing these powerful stories to life. Both films focus the viewer’s attention on the past and present economics of U.S. popular music and associated celebrity. Where Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom makes the film’s music a window onto another moment in time, Bessie makes music inextricable from the identity and performance of the film’s lead. The film of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom derives most of its atmospheric realism from Branford Marsalis’s film score. Indeed, the visual setting for the film is sparse. Suggestive snapshots of select street corners, Ma Rainey’s hotel, car, and the industrial backdrop of early twentieth-century Chicago are all that deepen the historic character of the stark brick, concrete, wood-paneled recording studio, and basement rooms in which the bulk of the film’s action takes place. Marsalis’s scoring makes strategic use of this. The underscoring is provocatively stripped down in similar ways, giving the patter of Wilson’s gripping dialogue—adapted by Ruben Santiago-Hudson and performed by acting powerhouses Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman, and Glynn Turman—additional weight and resonance. Once one’s eyes adjust to the noticeable lack of supersaturated, twenty-first-century special effects, one’s ears immediately begin to pick up on how the score cues the viewer in to the flow of life that carries the plot along. For instance, impressionistic piano and percussion are all that signal the synchronized, mechanized, rhythms of factory work, which serve as a larger backdrop for life on the Chicago street-corner where the recording studio (the film’s primary setting) is located. The underscoring never reaches beyond the forces of a typical backing band for a blues singer of Ma Rainey’s caliber, always working in tandem with the probing, spoken reflections that make this work such a